Limits to Growth

Queen Elizabeth 1st took a bath once a year – whether she needed it or not.

Many people now take 2 showers - a day. This is very relevant to our current stage of consumption.

Consumption
of our resources such as water, land, clean air and fossil fuels is now
at an unsustainable level. At the time of Elizabeth 1st the
world population was about half a billion. Today it is 10 billion. That
is a lot of showers. Clearly there have been many improvements since the
year 1500: we are now more hygienic, warmer, better fed and more
healthy, but the way we have gone about improving our lifestyles has
come at a price. And although we might think everything is quite
expensive enough already, we are not actually paying the full price.

The
full price would include the cost to the environment. Trees don’t bill
us for their loss of forests, endangered animals do not bill us for
their loss of habitat. The oceans ask no price for the pollution humans
pour into them, and the air will not send us an invoice for the extra
greenhouse gasses it has to burden. If the fish and whales took us to
court for murder of their family members we would at least have more
life left in the sea.

In 1972 a group
of eminent scholars, called the Club of Rome, published a book called
Limits to Growth. They spent years pulling information together, then
modelled it to create a future trend scenario. Their conclusions were
that we were using up the natural resources of the planet too quickly,
and if we did not change our ways, collapse was inevitable. Limits to
Growth was an early warning siren. Sadly few people listened.

In
essence, they estimated that if human beings continued to consume more
than nature was capable of providing, global economic collapse and
abrupt population decline could occur at around 2030. In other words
humans are taking too much, and not giving enough back, and sooner
rather than later there is going to be a very big problem.

Governments
baying for economic growth at all cost are digging us deeper into the
quagmire. They pursue this because they measure success in money, not in
wellbeing or protection of the ecosystems on which we all actually
depend in order to stay alive.

Ever more dangerous and unwholesome methods are being used to extract fossil fuels. Tar sands are huge wasters of energy and put more CO2 into the atmosphere in their extraction than when they are burnt. Fracking - or hydraulic fracturing – pumps toxic chemicals into the ground to release small pockets of gas, deep sea oil drilling has an abysmal record, but still they do it,

But
there is another way of doing business. Growth is still possible, but
only if we invest in technologies such as renewable energy supplies,
allocate money for innovation and research so that we can overcome our
dependence on dirty fuels and convert to clean energies such as wind,
tide and sun. We need to stop wasting so much, and stop polluting the
air with CO2 and poisons from incinerators and dirty industries. We need
to reuse more of what we have, and recycle more of what we need such as
metals and plastics. Recycling leaves more in the resource pot for the
next generation.

If you had the choice between a car burning fossil fuels, and a long and healthy life for your children, which would you choose?